Fedora Core 2 Test 3 Released

Wee writes "I just got an email from Bill Nottingham of Red Hat letting me know that the third and final test release of Fedora Core 2 is now available. The announcement mentions the big changes are SELinux being disabled by default, that on-and-off problem with install CD1 not booting should be fixed, and anaconda now is sporting 31 languages. The mirrors look like they are opening slowly but surely, and bug reports are always appreciated."

Comments

Please use BitTorrent!!!

[Chester K]

FC2-test3-binary-i386.torrent Official Fedora Core 2 TEST3 binary iso images for i386. 2.1GB 2004-4-27

FC2-test3-src-i386.torrent Official Fedora Core 2 TEST3 source iso images for i386. 2.0GB 2004-4-27

FC2-test3-binary-x86_64.torrent Official Fedora Core 2 TEST3 binary iso images for x86_64. 2.1GB 2004-4-27

FC2-test3-src-x86_64.torrent Official Fedora Core 2 TEST3 source iso images for x86_64. 1.9GB 2004-4-27

FC2-test3-x86_64-DVD.torrent Official Fedora Core 2 TEST3 DVD iso image for x86_64. 4.0GB 2004-4-27

FC2-test3-i386-DVD.torrent Official Fedora Core 2 TEST3 DVD iso image for i386. 4.1GB 2004-4-27

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Red Hat

[PeaceTank]

Ever since Red Hat died (sob) i've been kind of up in the air on distro's. I'm currently running Debian, but I decided that I'm going to at least try Fedora. I've tried Test 2, and overall, I was impressed. Other than the fact that they still have mp3 support disabled, it's a great distro. Still it lacks the amazing 'apt-get' feature that makes me love debian. I do like that it comes with Gnome pre-installed, since gnome can be a real pain to install otherwise, and the 2.6 kernel is nice. Wish somebody would just combine debian and Fedora and make the uber distro with a beatiful graphical installer like Fedora, and all the power of apt-get like Debian. For now, though, I'll just have to wait.

Re:Red Hat

[Professor Cool Linux]

you can have apt-get for fedora...
http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraHOWTO
http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Fedora_apt_and_yu m_repositories.html

Re:Red Hat

[IpsissimusMarr]

An RPM build of apt-get for Fedora is available at FreshRPMS. You can also install Synaptic which is a graphical GUI for apt-get.
Its all there for ya.

Re:Red Hat

[rgmoore]

apt is available for Fedora, though it isn't included in the install. You can download it from Fedora.us, which also has some instructions on configuring it. You might also want to consider using yum, which is included by default. yum's capabilities are very similar to apt's, including all the good stuff like automatically resolving and downloading dependencies, so it's definitely worth learning. I find that yum is good enough that the first thing I do when installing Fedora is to disable up2date.

Re:Red Hat

[asciiRider]

This always cracks me up. Millions of hours of work go into an open source unix - and some idiot complains about not having mp3 support available out of the box.

Re:Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as you're concerned, apt and yum do the same job. If you are happy with yum, then there's little point in switching.

my experience: I found it quite easy to persuade apt to restart downloads when my 56k modem (yuck!) disconnected -- so I can just apt-get upgrade and leave it alone -- yum wouldn't do that and I had to sit watching it (a bastard if you are upgrading 100Mb of OpenOffice).

Setting up your own yum repo was a lot easier though. Apt was very messy in that regard.

Languages

[FenwayFrank]

and anaconda now is sporting 31 languages.

Including "redneck"?

Exclusion of SELinux as a default?

[Coryoth]

Anyone know exactly what the issues with SELinux by default were? Having SELinux, or something equivalent system using the LSM kernel module as a default is the way that Linux should e heading - it would dramatically increase the security of Linux systems. I was looking forward to Fedora Core 2 being the first to include it by default, and anticipating other distributions making the move in the near future.

Jedidiah.

Re:Exclusion of SELinux as a default?

[justsomebody]

Yeah, this is a simple matter of lacking time.

Inclusion is one thing, hard core implementation is another. SELinux is not click RPM and install.

SELinux is a set of policies that define how your system is acting basing on actual happenings. To put it simply, take it as system account ACL-s (maybe I put it wrong but that was the only way to describe it as simple thing).

One month most probably isn't enough time to implement more than trivial policies that actualy take your system trough correct workout. Expect FC3 to be the first one with correct settings. FC2 can be but probably settings will depend on you

Re:Exclusion of SELinux as a default?

[pyros]

Well, the default disabled status of SELinux isn't truly disabled as you might think it is. I forget what the implementation is, but it is still there, I think along the lines of set to allow everything with no policy in place. SELinux is a huge part of FC2, but it's proven to be so freaking difficult to integrate with anything resembling a standard policy that they have to disable it by default or you will have an unusable system out of the box. And I say this as an apologetic RH fanboy. They will enable it by default when it doesn't break everything for 90% of the users.

Re:Exclusion of SELinux as a default?

[LnxAddct]

SELinux may be a bit too secure and/or complicated for those not familiar with it. By introducing it as an option, those who know about it and/or are willing to mingle with it can. I mean its possible to lock yourself out of your system even if you have root access, itd take quite a bit of rebooting(probably into knoppix) or reinstalling the system to get access to your system if you messed anything up. I can't comment on the stability of the SE patches but I would assume they are stable conidering that the NSA put them together, but if they aren't stable it may be causing trouble as well.
Regards,
Steve
P.S. If any of you are trying out fedora and prefer the ReiserFS file system just pass reiserfs to the kernel at boot. For those who don't know, ReiserFS is a journaling file system that is very stable, very fast, and has the best recovery that I've seen yet. It is also funded by DARPA as well as a few other secret donators.

Differences from Core 1

[thpdg]

Does anyone have the URL to the list of differences from Core 1?
Thanks!

Re:Differences from Core 1

[prockcore]

I don't know of a URL, but I'm running Core 2 on both my powerbook and my desktop.

Here's the most obvious changes I've seen:

Kernel 2.6.5 instead of 2.4.22
Gnome 2.6 instead of 2.4
x.org instead of XFree86
Mozilla 1.6
SELinux (although it's been turned off)

and upgraded versions of gcc, python, glibc, and a most other software.

Also instead of redhat-config-* it's all system-config now.

SELinux is a big step forward.

[hey]

There will be lots of problems with SELinux but it
is a giant forward for fine-grained security!
No doubt there will be quite a few initial problems with it.

Re:NVidia Drivers

[justsomebody]

Nothing, they don't work and it's not Fedora bug it's new kernel feature. As from 2.6.5 no kernel will work with them. Take Fedora as the first distro that actualy takes this step.

At least until NVidia finally resolves 4KSTACKS bug. Up to 2.6.5 kernels had this as feature. Now it's gone, as in bye bye.

NVidia please fix this bug, I have FC2 to install

SELinux, et al

[jd]

First, if SELinux is now disabled by default, then presumably it was enabled by default before. Hopefully with all the relevent patches to all relevent packages being applied!

However, this would result in a system very different from one that most Linux users would be used to. It would also be very different from any system described by any manual or textbook out there. MAC (Mandatory Access Controls) do strange things to the way systems work.

Now, those strange things happen to be Very Good Things, if you're wanting a secure system. They are also very disconcerting things, if you're wanting a very usable system.

Fedora's now on 4 CDs - yeesh! And the mirror I saw only showed source ISOs, no binary ISOs. That makes it hard to test such things as install routines.

Now, 4 CDs isn't too bad, when you consider that a comprehensive system would have nearer 100 CDs in it!

For those who don't believe me, here is a quick-n-dirty guide to some of the things you are missing:

• Scenery to FlightGear. This takes at least 2 CDs on its own!
  
• Various additional compilers and interpreters. eg: Occam, Intercal, BCPL, Cobol, etc. Now, arguably these aren't really in widespread use, but we're talking comprehensive, not practical.
  
• Alternative web/ftp servers. There are lots of these!
  
• A hard real-time kernel, eg: Linux with RTAI.
  
• Network routers, such as Click and PIMd
  
• Berlin
  
• Distributed systems code, such as a MOSIX kernel, a Beowulf kernel, Cactus, PVM/MPI, Globus, COSM, etc.
  
• FreeVMS (Another kernel patch!)
  
• The first 200 billion decimal places of Pi
  

The list is extensive. And, yes, all those would be valuable to someone. Even Pi.

So, I suppose that although 4 CDs seems a lot, it's actually a lot better than it could be.

No surprises

[Chuck Chunder]

The schedule is public and easy to find.

Re:Let's keep Gentoo out of this! ;-)

[rgmoore]

I think that you're seeing a false dichotomy. On the Debian side, you have a distribution that's strongly dedicated to making systems that are easy to admin (e.g. apt for package management) and can be kept very up-to-date by running unstable or testing. On the RedHat side, you have a distribution that refuses to distribute an mp3 decoder or NTFS support because of worries about IP issues. AFAIK, Fedora includes only software that's available under OSS licenses, and is actually quite proud of this fact.

Re:Let's keep Gentoo out of this! ;-)

[drinkypoo]

Nice karma whoring, you even managed to mix gentoo in there, without talking about gentoo! My hat is off to you sir.

RedHat is showing itself to be a less reliable distribution vendor, by canning one distribution (free RedHat) and unleashing the unstable Fedora betas which one day will become a product which you must pay for.

Granted, you can run RHEL without a license, though you will have a hard time supporting it.

Finally, there are many Linux distributions, not just two. Gentoo has become a major player - I'll mention it even if you won't. Let us not forget Novell and SuSe, either. And Slackware will never die!

Of course, for some people, like those who want Oracle support, there is only one distribution of Linux, and it is redhat. So I'm not sure either of us has managed to prove anything here, except that we have too much free time on our hands.

Re:Fedora *sucks*... just from my experience

[Spoing]

1. I installed it last week, and it froze the machine _cold_ twice... i.e. had to reach for the power switch. I had enough (as this box _had_ to be reliable) and switched to Debian Testing (sarge)... no problems since.

Erm...don't run a beta on an important machine?

If you do...thanks for testing!

Re:INFO for OSNews

[el-spectre]

True, and for good reasons, both are easy to acquire though, so what's the big deal?

BitTorrent

[kick_in_the_eye]

Great, only 675 hours to go! I Guess test 4 will be out by then.

Re:BitTorrent

[xaoslaad]

I thought it was bad at work when I was getting 51kbps. That's on a fairly unused T1. Then I brought the laptop home and resumed on my cable modem connection; it's been 5kpbs pretty steady even after multiple retries and a reboot; i dunno; I've been like you in the past with ultra fast downloads; but FC2T3 is blowing chunks of molasses today. I've been going since the torrent was made available this morning give or take ten minutes and im still trying to get the darn images down...

Re:Let's keep Gentoo out of this! ;-)

[MobyTurbo]

On the RedHat side we have a group of distros dedicated to making Linux easier for the user to use, more powerful for the admins to admin, and more up to date for the up-to-daters to update. On the Debian side you have people focused on making distributions that are not encumbered by IP violations.

The difference isn't so clear-cut. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat's revenue-generating product, unlike Fedora isn't so "up to date", and Red Hat also is very "religious" about the GPL, up to not including mp3 plugins for xmms. Fedora is like Debian Unstable, not a production system and bleeding-edge, RHEL is like Debian Stable, a seldom-updated except for security reasons distribution for stability.

it remains to be seen whether the Linux ecosystem can allow for two completely dichotomous memes to exist and flourish.

There are not just two distros, there are over a hundred, and many of the most used ones flourish enough to thrive. Slackware, for example, has been around for longer than Debian and Red Hat, and (except for the period where they had the libc5 problem) has become just as up to date as its competition. It has it's own niche, it's very Unix-like, is not especially bloated (though 9.1 for the first time grew to two installation CDs because of GNOME and KDE growing so big.) and does not have dependency hell by avoiding dependency checking altogeather. (I am posting this in Slackware right now, but I've used other distros so I know their strengths and weaknesses.)

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Sparc 32 port

[TheRealMindChild]

I started porting this to sparc 32 as a kind of contribution to the Aurora Linux project, but damn is that tedious. I dont even know of a distro that has an up to date port for sparc 32... except maybe gentoo, and I still think it lags behind a little.

Re:NVidia Drivers

[rickbrodie]

If you can, then just download the love-sources kernel. It's very bleeding edge, using the mm-sources and adding a few more patches on top. It specifically fixes the nvidia thing along with lots of other little problems.

The maintainer, steel300 is great and tries to satisfy as many requests as possible.

More information
Link to the patch and ebuild

Re:NVidia Drivers

[justsomebody]

Here you can read complete story about 4KSTACKS


Maybe you got it to set up now but if you read posts you can see what I
talked about

Re:What about X?

[pyros]

The nVidia problem has to do with a 4G memory patch (either apply a patch to fix it, or remove a patch that RH added). There's a thread on nvnews.net that tells how to do it, this isn't a link to that thread, but the thread should be listed in the search results that the link goes to.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have timed it really poorly for slackware because releases have been far and few between. 8.1 - 9.0 - 9 months. 9.0 - 9.1 - 6 months. And there has been no new release in 6 months.

Oxymoron-ad

[loconet]

This while I get a big fat flash ad from Microsoft telling me that mainframe Linux was found to be 10 times more expensive than Windows 2003

Re:What about X?

[AstroDrabb]

According to this post it looks like 2.6.6-rc2 & 1.0-5341 on FC2-t2 is working.

Re:Let's keep Gentoo out of this! ;-)

[AstroDrabb]

RedHat is showing itself to be a less reliable distribution vendor, by canning one distribution (free RedHat) and unleashing the unstable Fedora betas which one day will become a product which you must pay for.

And just how is that being less reliable? RH has chosen to to concentrate on the enterprise market and slow down their release cycles. The more active development is happening in Fedora. Fedora Core 1 is extremely stable for me. Fedora Core 2 is still in testing, so you cannot expect it to be totally stable yet.

Gentoo has become a major player

While Gentoo is nice and scratches a certain itch for a certain type of user, I would not call it a major player. When it comes to "big" industry support you have Red Hat or SuSE that other companies like IBM, Oracle, HP, People Soft, SAP, etc are supporting. It all comes down to your needs. Pick which distro fits your needs. You could run some enterprise apps under other Linux distros, though you would not get support. For example, you can get Oracle to run under Gentoo, though it would be silly since after paying all that money for Oracle, you would be wasting your support contract.

Re:What about X?

[juhaz]

Nothing much they could do about it.

XFree86 4.3.0 FC1 was using came out 26.2.2003, and Radeon 9600 and 9800 series later that year (9800XT not until november, I believe) so it couldn't support them out-of-the-box because they didn't exist when the relevant X version was made.

Since this one will be using the much more recent X.org server based on XFree 4.4.0, yes, it should work fine now.

Re:Is there a samba fix ?

[pyros]

The disabled smbfs in the kernel to promote testing the new CIFS module. I don't know if anyoune set up binary RPMs like they have for NTFS, but it would be as simple as 1. install kernel-source 2. edit EXTRAVERSION in Makefile 3. copy the right config from /usr/src/linux-2.4/configs to /usr/src/linux-2.4/.config 4. make oldconfig 5. make menuconfig and enable smbfs as a module 6. make dep 7. make modules 8. copy the compiled module to whatever folder the cifs module is at in /lib/modules 9. depmod -a 10. enjoy That's what I used to do for ntfs until I found the prebuilt RPMs at linux-ntfs.sf.net.

for the redneck impared

[Anonymous Coward]

Announcin' th' third tess release of Fedo'a Co'e 2

* Fum: Billy Joe Nottin'ham
* To: fedo'a-announce-list redhat com
* Cc:
* Subjeck: Announcin' th' third tess release of Fedo'a Co'e 2
* Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 16:36:11 -0400

"Eff'n ah's curt wif yo', it's on account o' time is a facko'. ah reckon

fast, ah type fast, an' ah need yo' guys t'ack fast eff'n yo' want

t'git th' bess outta this. So, purdy please, wif sugar on

top, try th' tess release!"

Yessuh, it's time fo' th' third an' final tess release of Fedo'a Co'e 2.

Notable changes in this hyar release include:

- SELinux is now disabled by default. Eff'n yo'd like t'install wif

SELinux suppo't, pass 'selinux' t'th' installer. Bug repo'ts about

th' behavio' an' suppo't of SELinux is sartinly still welcome; we is

still wawkin' on it.

- Th' 'CD1 won't boot' issue appears t'be resolved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Enny repo'ts of

corntinued failure is sartinly appreesheeated, cuss it all t' tarnation.

- Please check th' included translashuns fo' co'reckness an' sanity.

Anaconda now installs in 31 languages.

-----
Thank you and have a pleasant tomorrow.

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